Bridge School and Fundraiser

A high-school friend did me an immense service recently by inviting me to leave the cold and damp Oregon Fall and venture to the Bay Area to see her and attend the 24th annual Bridge School Concert on October 23-24. I brought the weather with me, and the sold-out concert (probably 20,000 people) sat in the cool and intermittent rain while headline musicians, all the way from country music legend Dr. Ralph Stanley to Buffalo Springfield redivivus, consisting of Richie Furay, Stephen Stills and Neil Young (original drummer Dewey Martin died in 1/09 and bass player Bruce Palmer died in 10/04) played with verve and obvious relish for the support of the Bridge School in Hillsborough. While I will have much more to say about this concert in the next essay, I need to place it in context with another fund-raiser happening nearly the same time (October 21) in the mid-Peninsula--that of President Barack Obama. The two events are almost fully unrelated, except that they occurred around the same time and in the same area and both raised probably $1,000,000 or more for good causes (check that--is the DNC a "good cause"?). Their convergence in time and space provides the occasion for my thoughts on music, politics, money, the Bay Area and living the good life.

Getting Started

It all began at my 40th High School reunion (Menlo-Atherton class of 1970), held in Menlo Park and Palo Alto on August 27-28 of this year. I had not previously attended a reunion, but a persistent and cheerful committee headed by three enterprising women (it is always the women who do the work) managed to track down alumni near and far-flung and, when the roll was called down yonder I was there. That weekend was memorable on a number of fronts, but especially significant for me were three things: (1) my sense of mismatch between whom I knew and who my "people" were; (2) the rather small or shallow knowledge I had of people in those days; and (3) a few friendships that blossomed during that time. The mismatch and knowledge can be further characterized as follows: my first experience in Menlo Park/Atherton in September 1967, when our family arrived from CT and I began school (on the second day--we registered on the first day), was with the sophomore football team. I immediately "fit in" athletically, started "both ways" and ended up being an honorable mention all leaguer for the year.

These were the guys, then, that I first met. And, they were the guys that I first recognized at the reunion in August. But, as we began to talk together, it dawned on me that we weren't cut out of the same mold. The people I ended up having engaging conversations with were, in general, the "AP English-girl" type. Because my family arrived in CA on the first day of classes, I never got "tracked" in the AP classes in English or social studies, and thus I was not with the "literary" or "tracked" people. This was pretty ironic, since my "elective" courses for the year were Algebra II, Spanish III, Chemistry and Latin II--which caused one of my football buddies to ask if I was a "f***in' genius.." I downplayed my genius and vowed to him my eternal commitment to the gridiron.

So, a mismatch in 1967 kept me unwittingly away from my "people," in a lot of ways. Yet, as I think of it, my literary and historical interests developed over time and weren't really that evident in 10th grade. Indeed, I would be ashamed to report publicly how I scored in the English portion of the PSAT and my first SAT in 1969; so I won't do that. And, it wasn't until I began to memorize Scripture seriously in the summer of 1971 that I began to refine my memory for history, a subject which now is a significant part of my identity. I quietly abandoned the science and math track, which I pursued and was rewarded for in high school (winning the Laboratory Science award in 1970; participating in a state math contest with two other guys from the school at US Santa Barbara in 1970) by my sophomore year in college, and I opened up the world of religion, history, sacred texts and all things philosophical and linguistic in nature. My family really didn't know how to advise me other than to urge me to pursue what dad had pursued--math and, in the 1950s, the nascent computer science field. So, I was "on my own," which is pretty much a metaphor of what life has been for me--but more of that on another occasion..

Thus, at the reunion there was a sort of mismatch between the people I knew, the people I 'should' have known and my interests. Second, I became aware of how little I knew of people in my class. It dawned on me for the first time the limitations that a move in September of your sophomore year in HS has for your ability to develop significant friends. Many of the people there had been "sandbox friends," so to speak, with each other. Many had also kept up regularly with each other over the years. I was active with the athletic, student government, AP-type (except for English and social studies!) crowd, and I thought I knew a lot of folks. But I realized at the reunion that though I recognized some, I didn't really know them. And, it dawned on me further, that I really wasn't a Californian. I always loved the Bay Area, and I felt during my high school days that I was at a sort of permanent summer camp, both because of the warm weather and the sense that things were fairly easy for me, but at the reunion I realized that I both envied and wasn't really a part of the "California-ness" of most folks. Such a "California-ness" is impossible to quantify, but is characterized by a greater sense of "hang loose" than I, with my Eastern background and other life choices, have consciously inculcated. As many people are bi-racial, so I perceive myself to be bi or tri-cultural (with those cultures being Eastern, Pacific NW and a sort of weak CA), and the dominant tone of the reunion, of course, was CA chic. Indeed, we were told that the dress code for the weekend was something like "business chic" or "casual chic" or whatever; I had no idea what that meant, but I managed to get along.

But the most gratifying part of the weekend was connecting with a few people (all you need is one or two, really) who wanted to continue connecting thereafter. Though "connectivity" has also been a rather large cipher for me in life, I decided to try to rectify that by continuing with a few people. In fact, one of them contacted me for the Bridge School concert, which takes us full circle to the trip to CA in the last weekend.

The next essay reflects further on the weekend.

4286